Many businesses and other organizations use private wide area networks (WANs) to execute intra-organizational communications, or to otherwise store and/or exchange data in a secure, reliable manner. For example, businesses may construct a virtual private WAN by overlaying secure (e.g., encrypted) communications on an otherwise public network, such as the public Internet. In additional or alternatively examples, organizations may utilize secure servers to coordinate and otherwise execute network traffic belonging to the organization in question. In still other examples, businesses may construct their own private or proprietary network infrastructure, which may have little or no connection or interaction with public networks.
All such private WANs provide their organizational owners with varying degrees of privacy and control with respect to organizational data. Consequently, in addition to providing organizations with secure, confidential communications, such private WANs may enable varying degrees of control and flexibility in enforcing various organizational policies with respect to how network resources are utilized, and may also be configured to provide a desired level of service quality (e.g., characterized by a guarantee of specified transfer speeds and/or network availability).
However, generally speaking, such advantages are associated with commensurate increases in cost. Consequently, a cost of use of a virtual private network may become undesirably high for an organizational owner. In particular, for example, global companies may require global solutions for the transfer of files between geographically-diverse locations. In such contexts, the use of a private WAN for file transfer may be undesirably expensive, or otherwise infeasible.